I’ll level with you here – my first hostel experience was exactly like a kid on a gap year. I had just graduated from college and two of my best friends and I managed to scrounge up enough cash to get to London for a week, but we were on a really tight budget.

We’d heard of hostels, but only in the terrifying, horror movie kind of way. Nonetheless, we started doing some more research, reexamined our budgets again and decided it was pretty much a hostel or a tent in the park. Since the latter was illegal, we hostelled it.